Black Bean Tacos

There are so many different kinds of tacos. One could dedicate an entire blog to tacos alone.

But I have many other things I'd like to cook, so I'll just settle for this post. Maybe in the future, I'll do another post about tacos. Salmon tacos. Tofajita tacos (I made that up, and I like it).

In these tacos, as I am wont to do, I used black beans - as opposed to, say, pinto beans or red beans. I have this thing where I feel like the darker a food is, the more nutrient-rich it is. It's not entirely true, of course, but I like to think it. In that light, black beans are the best thing ever.

So I made up these tacos, and I don't know the first thing about authenticity when it comes to Latin American food (or any food, for that matter), but that's not all that important to me. What's more important, is that it's nutritious and delicious, and preferably colorful. And that, these are. There are a few things I'd change - namely the fact that black beans are merely an equal component of the entire dish, and not featured - but I'll get to that at the end.

I do have to say one thing, though, and if you remember nothing else, remember this. Avocados are not optional on this taco.

I swear up and down I don't say that simply because I love avocados and think you should too (although, I do), but they provide a coolness, neutrality, and velvety lushness that nothing else can provide. They contrast the sharpnesses and strong flavors in the rest of the taco. They're completely necessary. Get over your "texture thing" and start experiencing a whole new world of food.


BLACK BEAN TACOS

red bell pepper
ear of corn
corn tortillas
shredded lettuce (whatever you have on hand)
shredded cabbage (purple or green)
thinly sliced onion
cooked and seasoned black beans
goat cheese, crumbled
sliced avocado
lime juice
fresh cilantro
sour cream or lime crème fraîche
Tabasco sauce
pinch of salt

1. If you don't have a grill, and you want "grilled" vegetables, sometimes sticking them right under the broiler will get the job done. In my case, I did the aforementioned treatment to an ear of corn and a red pepper. If you want lots of leftover "grilled" vegetables, just put lots of them in there. First of all, you want to put them on a cookie sheet.

Turn on the broiler and put the cookie sheet on the top rack so the vegetables are as close as they can get to the heating element without touching it (this might also be good if you lightly oil the corn first, but I haven't tried it). Leave them in there awhile, but make sure you watch to see when they are charring. Use tongs (or whatever you have) to turn them as they char, so you can char all the sides. Don't be alarmed if you hear popping and sizzling.

2. While your vegetables are broiling, cut up some of your other ingredients. I did my lettuce, cabbage, and onion during this time - it won't suffer if it sits out, cut, for awhile. The avocado, on the other hand, you should save until last.



Make sure to keep an eye on the oven during this time. If one vegetable gets done faster, take it out. In my case, that was the pepper.



You'll see that it got all wrinkly. This means the skin has started to separate from the flesh, which is ideal when you cook a pepper (it gets tough and curly and you need to peel it). Let it cool for a few minutes (10, maybe), and peel the pepper. During the cooling time, steam should form in the pepper that separates the skin further and makes it easier to peel.

Next came my corn, and it looked good.



Obviously, I like a little carbon on my food.

3. Cut the stem off the fat end of the corn cob when it cools, sit it upright and slice off the kernels. Just keep turning the cob and slicing off the kernels from the pointy end to the fat end. Mmmm!



4. Here's where it gets kind of blurry. You need to heat up your tortillas, but there are lots of ways to do this, and all of them are a little bit temperamental. The best way that I've found is to dip them briefly in water (however many you're going to use), stack them up, and wrap them tightly in foil that has a light coating of oil on the inside. Then you heat them, either in a warm toaster oven, or normal oven if it's on for something else (don't heat it up just for tortillas, though), or in a hot pan, covered. Heat them until the foil puffs a little. The goal here is to get the tortillas to soften and not be really dry.

5. Lay your warmed, softened tortillas on a plate, and pile stuff on them. (If you want to make them easier to pick up, stick their sides together so it's like that scene in Forrest Gump where Bubba and Forrest are sleeping outside in the rain and they lean their backs up against one another so they don't have their heads in the mud.) I started with lettuce and cabbage, followed by onion, and then spooned some delicious black beans (they should be warm, bordering on hot) on that, and crumbled a good amount of goat cheese over it. I lined it with broiled corn and red pepper, topped it with sliced avocado (onto which I sprinkled some lime juice) and cilantro, and drizzled on some lime crème fraîche (you can substitute a small amount of sour cream - I only used lime crème fraîche because I still had some). I then doobled on some Tabasco, and sprinkled some sea salt over the whole thing. It's all a matter of taste how much you use; if you find it lacking, put more on.

So... that's pretty much how I make most tacos, the only variations being in the ingredients.

In these tacos, I might leave out the lettuce and cabbage altogether. I don't think it added anything. I would use a little more black bean, and a little less pepper and corn.

The rest, I do believe, is lovely.

Oaxaca Tacos

I think it's time to add something new to my repertoire. Enter the Cafe Flora Cookbook and one of the restaurant's most popular dishes. Cute, aren't they? Sitting there all propped up on black beans? Tasty, too, crispy and oven-fried. I will be filing this away in the "usable recipes" section of my brain. The techniques I learned are applicable in... oh, billions of ways. Oaxaca tacos will be back, in one form or another. Just you wait.

Reading the ingredients, I didn't find it to look all that... nutritionally balanced. A corn tortilla (starch) filled with potato (starch) and cheese (fat). Mmm, fatty starch. But then I read on and noticed that it is typically served with a black bean "stew" (enter fiber and protein, albeit carried by more starch) and pico de gallo (YAY! color!). Well. If it has fiber and protein and fatty starch, and is naturally colorful, sign me up. Especially when the fat includes smoked mozzarella.

Dear sweet son of a biscuit-eating bulldog, try some smoked mozarella if you haven't had it before.

Unfortunately for those who might want to make this, I feel obligated to refrain from posting the exact recipe. You can buy the book. If you live in Seattle, go eat at Cafe Flora and order the Oaxaca tacos.

I don't feel guilty enough to refrain from posting my progression through cooking, however. I am confident that if you follow along and experiment a little, you can recreate them. Or at least something similar.

--- --- ---

So, I started the day prior to cooking, really (two days ago, to be exact). I prepared some "crème fraîche" by mixing just a smidge of buttermilk into heavy cream and letting it sit out at room temperature for a day. I cooked my black beans. For goodness sake, if you don't know how to cook black beans, learn. It's terribly easy and far cheaper and more ecological than buying them canned.

This made cooking day rather easy. Into the cultured crème fraîche I added some fresh lime juice and zest and stuck it in the fridge. Nobody wants to use room temperature crème fraîche. I then boiled and drained some russet potatoes, and mashed them up good with a little butter and salt. This time, I had a potato masher. Why, you ask? I didn't have one last time, right? Well, it's because partway through cooking the potatoes I realized I had no toothpicks. And I need toothpicks to hold the tacos together when they cook. So, naturally I had to huff and puff over to the store and get some. I figured I'd be clever and also pick up a potato masher. See what I did there? That's called breaking the cycle.



Following the potato mashing, I preheated my oven to 400. Back onto the stove went my cooked black beans, into which I tossed some frozen corn, chopped cilantro, garlic, and a few spices and an herb. Which ones? Oh, figure it out. Learn to season your black beans.



I simmered that for a little while (not that long) to let it make itself happy, and prepped my other taco ingredients. My favorite part was a 50/50 mix of shredded cheddar and smoked mozarella, with some red pepper flakes added for interest. I also briefly fried (a few seconds on both sides) 8 corn tortillas in vegetable oil. The goal was to get them to get hot, and soak up some oil. They need to be pliable so you can roll them (hence the heat), but you want them to get crispy and delicious and hold their shape after baking in the oven (hence the oil). You need to keep them warm while you're working, so stick something like foil over them. Not pictured is some minced up red bell pepper. Next time I'll use green and yellow, or green and red.



If you make these, shred a little more cheese than I did. And, prior to filling your tacos, divide your fillings (potato, pepper, and cheese) each into 8 equal piles. None left over, none run out. Fill in that order: potato, pepper, then cheese. Actually, fill in whatever order you want. I guess it doesn't matter. I'd probably put the potato on the bottom either way, though. And it helps to spread it out in a strip from one side of the tortilla to the other, so you don't get a really fat tortilla that splits open in the oven and has tough edges from lack of filling on the sides.



Put little toothpicks in them to hold them closed. Line them up on a baking sheet. You don't need to grease it, as the tortillas should be oily enough all by themselves.



Bake them in the oven for... I don't know if that's copyrighted. Bake them in the oven until they get crispy and melty. It should take roughly the amount of time that a sitcom episode without commercials takes.



You can take out the toothpicks now; they will hold their shape. Righteous, no? Serve with a ladle of your black beans, drizzle of your lime crème fraîche, some salsa or pico de gallo on the side, and a wee bit of cilantro.



--- --- ---

I wonder what I'd change? I'd use more cheese, for one, I think. I'd like to try it with a mix of sweet potato and yucca, with some kind of braised bitter greens and some kind of smokey cheese.

Seriously. Get some of that mozzarella.

Neatloaf, Mashed Potatoes, and Gravy

For some reason, since I stopped eating terrestrial vertebrates, excuses to consume mashed potatoes have been few and far between. You'd think that an unassuming dish of smushed up roots would give little offense to my sensibilities. And it's true - I love mashed potatoes. I wish I could eat them every day. But I don't - I hardly ever do. What would I eat them with? You can't just sit down with a plate of mashed potatoes and a pile of beans and call it a meal. You can't really eat them with fish (the fish would slink off into the abyss of undetectability and viola, you've wasted $10). They're pretty good with meatloaf, though. Now, to remove the meat part...

...Not that hard, as it turns out. Instead, use a bunch of eggs and vegetables. Neat, right?

Oh, and I made gravy, too. It's something that I didn't care for too much while growing up, but have learned to cherish in very recent years. Or is it gravy? That thing I've been making? Maybe it's just a mushroom sauce. You tell me. I've never been that good at cramming content into an existing definition.

I should mention that although the recipe is not identical to anyone else's, and it was my idea to make it, I gathered a lot of ideas and ingredient/method inspiration from a blog post from Diets, Dessert, and Dogs.


NEATLOAF

2 slices fresh bread, the less refined the better (I used whole wheat, and also found that 2 slices made it taste too bready - I would use 1 slice next time)
about that volume in nuts of various kinds (I used walnuts and Brazil nuts)
2 medium carrots, shredded
1 onion, diced (about the same volume as carrots)
2-3 ribs celery, diced (about the same volume as onions)
Cooking oil
1 lb mushrooms
3 fat cloves garlic
few sprigs some fresh resinous herb (I used rosemary)
handful cilantro leaves (or parsley, you could use that)
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup vegetable broth
1/4 cup dry red wine (note: I detest drinking wine, and wine drinking culture. I love it in food. Now I have a mostly full bottle that I don't want. If you also dislike drinking wine, I recommend going to Trader Joe's and getting three buck Chuck. At least you won't be wasting lots of money. And let me know if you have some ideas for me to finish this without having to drink it)
Ketchup
5 eggs

If you're making all three, make the neatloaf first. It takes awhile in the oven and then has to cool a little, so you can do other things while that's going on. And this is a time-consuming recipe, even with a food processor, though it's actually really simple and extremely forgiving. If you don't have a food processor, I'm sure it can be done, but... good luck. Try chopping really finely? Blending in small batches? I've never tried it. *clutches her Cuisinart*

1. OK. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Whip out the Cuisinart (have I mentioned how much I love my Cuisinart and am glad that my mom doesn't use it anymore, thus my inheritance of it? The thing's like, 30 years old and still amazing). Tear the bread up, and stick it in with the nuts. Use a bunch of nuts. Give it a whir until the nuts and the bread crumbs are all the same size, and all a bit crumby. Set them aside in a bowl, and use the grating attachment to put through the carrots. You could do this by hand, but it would take you 10 minutes instead of 20 seconds. Heat up a pan on the stove over medium heat, with some oil. Mix up all your carrots, onion, and celery together (it should be a huge heap) and cook it. Stir it every so often to make sure it's all getting heat, until everything starts to turn orange and the onions get a bit translucent. Then you can take it off the heat. And put it in a bowl.

2. Put the normal blade back in the food processor and process together the mushrooms, garlic, and herbs. You can actually do this while the other stuff is still on the stove. It doesn't take long. Just make a bunch of tiny bits, like the mushrooms in vegetarian burgers. Add this mixture to the emptied pan (again, over medium heat) with some more cooking oil. Stir every so often. It will let out liquid. (Hopefully you won't have to stop it halfway through cooking when you realize that you've made it to 25 without owning a corkscrew and you have an unopened bottle of red wine that you need to open so you can use the wine in your cooking, so you have to run to the nearest grocery store to supply your need. If you have a corkscrew, carry on.) When it's done letting out liquid, it should smell good. Add the vegetable broth and the red wine to the pan and stir it up. (Hopefully you won't have to stop the cooking again when you realize that you've also made it to 25 without ever using a corkscrew and as easy as it may appear, things look rough when the cork breaks off in the bottle and you have to run to the computer to Google, "how to remove broken cork from wine bottle," before discovering that the little wings on the corkscrew should go up when you're screwing in, not down, and you actually push them down to lift out the cork, and presto! you have two halves of a cork and an open bottle of wine. If you know how to use a corkscrew, carry on.)



3. Chuck a bunch of the carrot mixture into the food processor (at least half of it) and process it to be in teeny bits like the mushrooms. Then combine all the mushroom, all the carrot/onion/celery, and all the nut/bread crumb mixture together in the pan. Squirt some ketchup in there. I don't know how much. 3 tablespoons? Whatever seems right. Stir it all up and season to taste with salt and pepper.



4. Beat the eggs vigorously in a large bowl until they're foamy. With a whisk, it'll take a minute or two. Longer with a fork, less time with egg beaters. In any case, they should look like this:



You may now dump the whole mixture from the pan into the bowl with the eggs, and stir it until it makes a very, very thick batter.

5. Prepare a standard-sized loaf pan by greasing it. And flouring it, while you're at it. I just greased with olive oil (should have used a saturated fat) and skipped the flour, and... well, you'll see later what happened when I unmolded it. Anyway, when your pan is ready, put the mixture into it, smooth out the top, and pop it in the oven.



Cook it on the middle oven rack for about an hour, give or take (mine was an hour and 10, but the loaf pan was also sitting in a glass dish, which may or may not have slowed the heat), or until it gets to 160°F in the middle (find out using a meat thermometer or instant-read thermometer), which is the proper "cooked" temperature for eggs. If you don't have a thermometer, an hour should be OK.

MASHED POTATOES

3 lbs red potatoes
few sprigs rosemary leaves, minced
1-2 cloves garlic, pressed (a really fat one will suffice)
~1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup vegetable broth
2-4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, or butter (which I didn't have much of and wanted to save it for the gravy, so I used oil)
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper

If you're smart about life, you'll have more than 4 tbsp of butter on hand when you make a huge batch of mashed potatoes and gravy. That is all.

1. Slice your potatoes (I make 1/2-inch thick slices). Bring a huge pot of water to a boil, add a really fat pinch of salt, add the potatoes, return to a simmer, and cook for 10-15 minutes. You know, until they're done. Drain them and return them to the pot. While they're still hot, add the minced up rosemary and pressed garlic.

2. Mix it up a little, then add the buttermilk and vegetable broth, and oil or butter. (Hopefully, when you ran to the store earlier you'll have also picked up a potato masher. But because you didn't, and dag nabbit, you've got something in the oven and can't go again, you will make this work and you will use the slotted spoon as awkwardly as it takes with enough elbow grease to KILL a man! If you have a potato masher, carry on.) I've never used vegetable broth before in my potatoes, or olive oil, but let me tell you this: I was really pleasantly surprised. It was almost better than butter. (I was able to serve it with a little butter, and that kind of toppled it over the hill of splendid and into the valley of amazing graze. You know, where the happy cows live.) Mix it up some more, and add salt and pepper to taste. It should taste pretty spectacular.

MUSHROOM GRAVY

2-3 tbsp butter or a mixture of butter and cooking oil (as long as butter is at least half of the mixture, which it was for me. All butter is ideal, if you have it)
2 cups sliced mushrooms
2-3 tbsp flour
~2 cups vegetable broth
~1/2 cup heavy cream
no more than 1/4 cup dry red wine

I love making mushroom gravy with wine. It has the most alluring fragrance. But once I used too much wine and it tasted then like too much wine. I didn't like that nearly as much. So don't go overboard.

1. Heat up your butter/oil in a skillet over medium heat until the butter foams, like so.

Add the mushrooms and coat them. Like so.



Let them cook in there for several minutes, turning them every so often, until they let out their liquid and then start to brown. Let them brown. Let them brown until you smell the teeniest, faintest hint of charcoal. You will also see a golden brown color developing on your pan. The French call it "fond." I call it flavor. In any case, it'll come off the pan and go into the gravy, which is what we want.



2. Then add the flour and toss it together to coat all the mushrooms. Try not to have flour clumps. As soon as you smell toasting flour (which should be very soon), slowly pour in the vegetable broth and whisk as you do. You don't want flour clumps at this point, but if you get a few, don't worry too much. You probably won't notice later and now you can be more vigilant when you make gravy in the future. It'll start to bubble, which is good. Turn down the heat to medium-low.



3. Carefully pour in the cream, whisking as you go. Do the same with the wine. The contents of the pan should have a very slightly musky purplish hue.



Bring it back up to a gentle simmer, and let it cook for about 10 minutes, stirring every so often. It'll thicken a little, and don't worry if it seems a little thin in the pan, when it cools ever so slightly it will thicken up a good deal.

4. Finish up by bringing the neatloaf out of the oven, because, miraculously, it happens to be time. It should be browned on top, and a bit cracked. Let it cool in the pan for 10-20 minutes.



Carefully run a thin knife around the sides to separate it from the pan. Invert it onto a cutting board or similar surface. If you used a thin oil and didn't flour your pan, you might see this on the cutting board after inverting it:



and something that is undoubtedly the missing piece still in the pan, but if you're as clever and industrious as I am, it won't really matter. Very much.



You see? Nobody will know.

5. Slice off a piece and serve yourself, with some potatoes, and gravy over both. And if you're feeling spunky, you'll have made some braised collards or something (spinach would have been nice) to go on the side.

There we have it. The moral of the story, as far as I'm concerned, is not to get worked up about things that happen to go wrong when you're cooking. Or itty bitty oversights you may have made prior to engaging in your own personal cooking competition. What would an Iron Chef do? Use it to your advantage. Learn from it. Make a Hyperbole and a Half-esque comic strip, if you will. You will still have a good dinner.

Spinach Hot Toss

Right now, you may be internally questioning the legitimacy of the term "hot toss." Conversely, it's possible you have assumed that "hot toss" is, indeed, a legitimate name for some type of dish, and you just don't know what it is. I suppose it mightn't have crossed everyone's mind to read the title of the post, either, and thus many of you are unsure of the nature of my monologue. I'm going to clear the air, so to speak.

Perhaps nobody has used the term "hot toss" before, and that's okay. But it's about time we do. If we can give ridiculously descriptive names to recipes such as "Ground Beef, Onion, and Garlic Casserole Layered with Peas, Carrots, and Rosemary-Mashed Potatoes Seasoned with Sea Salt and Freshly Ground Black Pepper, Topped with 18-month Hand-Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and Baked in a 10-inch Round Earthenware Dish," or absolutely not even a little descriptive monikers like "Dutch Baby," surely I can, in good conscience, coin a concise yet slightly descriptive handle along the lines of "Spinach Hot Toss" (it's hot, contains spinach, and you toss it together). And we should all feel at liberty to use it. Legitimate? I think so.

I am a simple woman. I enjoy instant gratification, small pleasures, and justifiably unpretentious living. This is a simple meal. Filling, nutritious, but simple. And it costs under $5 to make 2 servings. It's no $.99-cent 12-pack of instant ramen noodles, either. (I say that with both pride and conviction.)

I am not pretentious.


SPINACH HOT TOSS

Extra-virgin olive oil or other cooking oil
chopped onion
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
some kind of herbs/spices (I used a little oregano and a bit of smoked paprika)
whole lotta frozen chopped spinach
few garlic cloves, pressed
some finely chopped nuts (walnuts or pecans are best)
small handful of cooked black beans (or other cooked legumes)
about as much frozen corn as you had beans
again as much cooked rice, barley, quinoa, or other starchy bits
bunch of grated cheddar cheese
fresh tomato, chopped up
fresh basil (or cilantro, depending on your spice palette)

1. Chuck your onions in a pan with some olive oil, over medium heat.

2. Stir them a bit and cook them until they get yellow and start to crisp. Or brown them. It doesn't really matter, just don't burn them.



3. Add a little bit of seasoning and stir it around, and then dump in the spinach, nuts, garlic, beans, and corn. Mix that up good (I forgot the nuts).



I used more beans than I wanted to (I really wanted to use up what I had leftover in my fridge, which was more than I should have), and not nearly as much spinach as I wanted to (I ran out), but it's not like the dish is ruined or anything. Anyway, it should look greener than mine.

4. Keep cooking that, and stir it every so often, until the spinach and corn is all thawed out and everything's nice and hot in the pan. Then mix in your grain/seed/starchy bit. I used pearled barley, since I had some on hand. I did have to cook it first, but that's kind of a non-involved process so I didn't care. Again, I used a little more than I intended. Oh well.



5. Take it out of the pan, put it in a few bowls, and mix in a whole bunch of grated cheddar. And then chop up some fresh tomato, and a little bit of basil, and put it on top.

Looks good, no? Except my dish ended up being more about grains and legumes, and less about spinach and cheese. I like the version with more spinach and cheese better. But it's kind of hard to mess this one up. And it takes like, 10 minutes. And why the heck wouldn't you want to make it?

I mean, Hot Toss. Come on.

Vegetarian Burgers

The moment you've all been waiting for has finally arrived. You may now read a step-by-step pictorial instructive digi-manual on how to make vegetarian burgers that are not rubbery-bendable, highly processed, full-of-nothing-whole, weird-tasting, headache-inducing, perfectly extruded little cylinders. No, these are real burgers. Messy, delicious patties of summertime. Only without the flesh.

I must apologize that they're not vegan. But only a little, because I quite enjoy them as they are. I'm sure if you're vegan you can think of some way to veganify these burgers. Or come up with your own. Or keep eating frozen boxed products that resemble food in no good way. Or skip the burgers altogether.

These are relatively easy to make, especially if you have a food processor. If not, you just have to work a little harder. And for some reason, like yogurt and vegetable stock, vegetarian burgers are one of those foods that people just don't seem to want to make themselves. They'll bake themselves a fancy cake, or make a batch of cookies requiring specific temperatures, carefully measured ingredients, and perfectly spaced plops of dough on a lined sheet - but they won't throw together a few comestibles to make a burger. Why is that? I honestly have no idea. Frozen "veggie" burgers from a box taste disgusting. And call me persnickety, but I don't want soy protein concentrate, modified vegetable gum, or wheat gluten (in its most naked form) tainting my food with its indeterminate origins (or destination, for that matter). My philosophy is that if you can't make an ingredient relatively easily in your kitchen from its whole source, it probably doesn't belong in your diet (key word = "probably" - there are exceptions).

Now. I'm not on a high horse, I understand people have time limits, and budgetary considerations, but in all honesty - these don't take that long to put together and they're cheaper than buying them premade, and they are so many times better. You can also form them, freeze them, and save them for later. Maybe you could even make some kind of a meatless loaf, but I've never tried it.

A little tip for making vegetarian burgers: use lots of mushrooms. These provide juiciness, the natural glutamate flavor (also found in beef), brown color, iron, potassium, and some B vitamins as well. As for the other ingredients - onions and garlic because they're awesome and should go in almost everything, bread crumbs to absorb moisture, ground nuts for some good extra fat and to simulate those crispy bits that are on the outside of a beef burger, eggs to both hold it together (when they cook, they grab and hold) and provide some B-12 and protein and whole fat, quinoa for a complete plant protein, black beans for more plant protein and good fiber and folic acid and iron (and flavor!), cheese for some melty delicious fat, nutritional yeast for your dose of vitamins (and a good flavor), salt and pepper and Worcestershire sauce for seasoning. It may seem like a lot of fat, but one of these burgers has half the fat and barely more than half the cholesterol (and a lot more of the vitamins and minerals, except B-12) than a beef burger of the same size. So there you go. It's healthy to boot.


VEGETARIAN BURGERS

3/4 cup nuts (any soft or fatty nut will do - I used peanuts, but walnuts and pecans work really well too)
1/2 cup bread crumbs
3/4 lb mushrooms - cremini or button (creminis are great, unless they're more expensive)
1 cup cooked black beans, drained
1 cup cooked quinoa, drained and pressed dry if very moist
1-2 tbsp cooking oil
1/2 cup diced onion
3ish cloves of garlic, pressed
~1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce (check ingredients for vegetarianism - many brands have anchovies)
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup shredded swiss, provolone, or mozarella cheese
1 tbsp nutritional yeast
2 eggs

1. Your first step is to make use of your food processor. I like processing in the following order: first nuts, then bread, then mushrooms, then quinoa/black beans. That way, you don't have to wash the food processor in between. For the nuts, process until they're pretty fine and crumbly, but do be aware that when processed past a certain point, they become nut butter. That's all fine and good, and I'm sure it wouldn't hurt the recipe too much, but it's not what we're going for. Set them aside when they're processed, and toss into the empty processor some stale artisan bread. Break it into chunks first. Let it whir away for a few minutes until you get crumbs. If you already have bread in crumb form, you can use that. If it came from a box or a can, I wouldn't trust it. But that's just me. So set your crumbs aside and put in your mushrooms. Pulse it until the mushrooms just look like itty bitty pieces but aren't quite yet a mushroom paste. Like this:

If the pieces are too big, they won't stick together as well. And they won't cook as fast. So take out the mushrooms and set them aside, and chuck in the black beans and quinoa together. Just pulse until the beans get sufficiently mushed up. The quinoa is somewhat immune to the blade, which is fine.



2. Heat up a medium-sized steel or stainless steel pan over medium heat with some oil. When it's hot (put your hand over it, you should feel a good amount of heat but not see any smoking), put in the onions. Cook them for a few minutes, stirring them around a bit every so often. When they are translucent and starting to brown, dump in the ground up mushrooms, and the garlic, and stir to get it mixed. In a minute or so, the mushrooms will release a whole bunch of mushroom juice.



This is delightful. Just let it do that. Stir it every so often. The water will evaporate and you'll get a more concentrated flavor in the pan. Once all the liquid is out, and the mixture inside the pan is formable, stir in the Worcestershire, take it off the heat, and transfer it to a bowl (if it stays in the pan, it might start to stick). Season the mushroom mix with salt and pepper.



3. Right away, stir in the cheese of your choice. Usually I use Swiss, but I had Provolone on hand this time and it worked better than I expected. It was adhesive and gooey and stringy. I was enchanted, actually. Once it's all melted, stir the mushroom mix with the bean mix in a bowl. Add the nuts, bread crumbs, and nutritional yeast and combine everything. Taste for seasoning and adjust with salt and pepper as necessary. Once you are satisfied, add the eggs. Just crack them right into the bowl and mix it all up until the eggs disappear and the contents of the bowl look wetter than before.



This is your burger mix. It'll make about eight. Or however many you want.

4. You can cook these in whichever way strikes your fancy. I like them best grilled, but as luck would have it, I don't have a grill. Some people like to broil them. I don't like to because then I have to bend over and put things in the oven. So I cook them on the stovetop in my delightful cast iron pan. In any case, it's good to toast your bun first. If you have the option, get a really attractive bun from some neat local bakery. I didn't want to scour the local bakeries, and the Whole Foods here has a very meager selection of fresh baked goods (all their own, as they don't seem to be into supporting the local economy), so I went with Rudi's whole wheat buns. (I could have made some, I guess, but that takes hours and is a somewhat touchy process.)

A side note - Rudi's has changed its label/packaging, and its products (although the press release on their website talks only of the new packaging). Whatever happened to product integrity? I got some of the pre-change whole wheat buns, and compared the ingredients to the whole wheat buns in the new packaging - totally different. In addition, the new ones have more calories, more sugar, more sodium, more carbohydrates, less fiber, less protein, and a much lower vitamin and mineral content. Uhhh... thanks, Rudi's. BTW, your new packaging is ugly.

Back on track. Toast the buns.



6. You should probably ready your condiments at this time as well so your burger doesn't sit around getting cold while you slice tomatoes. I like (from bottom to top): bun, dill pickle (or relish), lettuce, avocado, tomato, burger, completely melted cheddar cheese, fresh thinly sliced onion, ketchup, and mayo on the top bun. Unfortunately, I didn't have any lettuce and had to use kale. No biggie. And I messed up the order of the bottom ingredients. But it wasn't too bad.

Anyway, you should cook your burger. It's important that your pan or grill or broiler or whatever is not too hot. I mean, it should be hot, but not super hot. This is a dense burger with a lot of moisture - you don't have to worry too much about drying it out, but you do have to worry about cooking it through (it does have egg, after all, and it will fall apart if it's not cooked enough). If your heat is too high, the sides will burn before it cooks to the middle. But don't worry too much. Just scoop out a bit of burger mix, form a patty (make sure it's not too thick or it will never cook through), and put it on.



And flip it when it's brown and halfway cooked.



If you're using cheese, stick it on top of the browned side right now. It should be thinly sliced for maximum meltage.



I like to cover the pan with a large lid for a minute or so while the cheese melts. Do take the lid off to finish cooking the burger, though, as some moisture has to evaporate. It should be melty. And brown on both sides, and cooked all the way through.



And now... you can put it together in whatever order you want, with whatever condiments you want (the more adornments, the better). But it should look more or less like this:



and taste somewhat like a summer barbecue party.

I suggest that you make some vegetarian burgers of your own. Change the ingredients a little, if you'd like, there's no right or wrong. They're extremely satisfying. And gratifying. Maybe a touch mystifying, but only if you haven't made them yourself.

Lasagna

This post is long overdue. I make lasagna all the time. It's one thing I feel comfortable doing start-to-finish with no guidance, experimenting with, and it nearly always turns out quite perfectly. To my tastes, anyway. I'm not sure if I should even call it lasagna, actually, because like most things on this blog, it's a bastardization of whatever the original dish is supposed to be. Oh well. Any cook should be able to tell you there's no "one way" for a dish to be. They always evolve. Tradition be damned.

I'm not a big fan of lasagnas that are oozing with copious amounts of completely pureed marinara or indecent levels of gooey cheeses. I like flavor in my lasagna. Mushrooms, eggplant, basil, olive. I like lasagna textured. Each layer should offer something new to the palate. There should be some chewiness/crunch to the very top layer, lightly topped with flavorful, aged Italian cheese. Slight al dente *fwood* when you slice into a noodle. Each vegetable should dance and sing its own number together in a medley of garden-fresh tastes. You should run across a whole basil leaf now and then. Tomatoes brighten the whole face of lasagna, but doesn't smother it. And the white layers... should be quiet. Mellow... and dear.

Speaking of the white layers. I follow in my mom's footsteps here, and use cottage cheese and sour cream instead of ricotta or a bechamel sauce. I imagine this is probably because it's cheaper to buy cottage cheese, but I've prefer the taste of it. Associations, you know.

One thing I always try to do nowadays with my lasagna is make my own noodles. I think the texture and taste is superior to boxed dry noodles, although it tacks on about an hour extra to prep time (I'll include my recipe for this, although of course you can buy noodles if you wish). It would have been much easier had I remembered to bring my pasta machine (essentially a dough roller) with me when I moved. I made do with a rolling pin, and felt like a real cook. You really get to know your food this way. You can feel what it feels. Understand what brought it to you. It's a little bit surreal. That said, I didn't grow the wheat or grind the flour or raise the chickens that laid the eggs. Some day, maybe, but not in a small apartment in a desert city.

Oh yeah, and I use bread flour for the pasta. Bread flour is like all-purpose, but with a higher protein and gluten content. You can probably use all-purpose flour, but you'd have to work it longer to develop the gluten, and maybe add less flour to make up for the extra working. Maybe it would perform pretty similarly. Try it and let me know.


LASAGNA

9 5/8 oz (about 1 3/4 cups plus 2 tbsp) bread flour
3 large eggs
1 large eggplant, chopped into 1/2-inch cubes
Extra-virgin olive oil
salt
freshly ground black pepper
1 medium onion, diced
bunch of cremini or button mushrooms... maybe 10? 15?, sliced
red pepper flakes
fennel seeds
oregano, dried or fresh
thyme, dried or fresh
pinch salt
freshly ground black pepper
3 cloves garlic, pressed
handful of pitted, drained Kalamata olives, chopped coarsely
28-oz can diced tomatoes (fire-roasted are lovely)
16 oz cottage cheese (the highest fat you can find)
8 oz sour cream (full-fat)
1 egg
1/2 cup or so frozen chopped spinach, thawed
bunch of fresh basil leaves
chunk of some aged Italian cheese, such as parmesan, asiago, romano, or a blend (I used Pecorino Romano)

1. Preheat the oven to 375°F. Make your pasta dough. It's actually pretty easy, especially if you have a food processor. Put your flour and 3 eggs into the food processor, like so.

I know you can only see two eggs in the picture. Trust me, I used three. One made a break for it and went to the other side of the bowl. Turn on the processor and let it whirl until the dough forms a big clump (you can mix it with your hands if you don't have a FP).



And then take it out and knead it forcefully until it gets smooth and not at all sticky. This could take anywhere from 2-8 minutes. When it looks like this:



wrap it up (or put in a close-fitting bowl and cover) and put it in the fridge to rest for an hour. You have to let it rest. The gluten strands relax during this time. If you try and use it now, the gluten will tighten so much that you won't be able to roll it out thinly because it will keep contracting and you'll get really weird, lumpy, thick noodles.

2. Prepare the eggplant. Toss it in a bowl with a little oil and salt and pepper (just a sprinkle of each, enough oil to barely coat). Spread them on a cookie sheet like so:



Put it in the oven and keep it there for 45 minutes to roast.

3. Time to make the sauce, which is probably the messiest part of the whole process. Start by heating a stainless skillet over medium heat and putting in a few tablespoons of olive oil. Dump in the onions and mushrooms right away and toss a bit to coat. Keep an eye on it, stir every minute or two. It will go through a "wet stage" where the mushrooms let out a bunch of liquid. Don't worry about this, just keep it cooking and let it evaporate.



In the meantime, put a bit of red pepper flakes (tsp, probably), fennel seeds (maybe 2 tsp), oregano (tbsp or so if dried and crumbled, more if fresh), thyme (2 tsp if dried leaves, more if fresh), a wee pinch of salt, and some pepper all in a mortar and grind it with the pestle until the fennel seeds are a little crushed. To have it ready to add, put it in a little bowl with the pressed garlic. It all goes in at once, after all.



Dump it into the onion-mushroom mixture (when the liquid has evaporated) and stir it around. Let it cook for a minute (stirring frequently) while you chop up your olives.



When it smells amazing, and looks like this:



dump in the olives and give it a toss. If there's a little bit stuck to the bottom of the pan (there should be some residue, but not too much else unless you're cooking at too high a heat), don't be tempted to add more oil, because you really don't need it. Dump in all the tomatoes and listen to it hiss. That's the sound of all the residue coming off the pan. Mm, browned stuff. Give it a good stir, turn down the heat and let it simmer.



4. At this point, you can probably take your eggplant out of the oven.



Run a spatula under it at this point so it doesn't adhere to the pan while it cools. You can leave the oven on, if you hurry up with the rest of the process, or turn it off and remember to turn it back on later when you're getting ready to bake the lasagna.

5. While your sauce is cooking and your eggplant is cooling, it is probably time for your pasta dough. Take it on out of the fridge, divide it in two, and re-cover one half and save it. With the half you took out, make it into a ball, flatten it slightly, and dust it with flour. You should also dust your counter with flour, as you don't want the dough to stick.



OK, so you have to roll out this little ball of dough. It sounds easy. Hahaha. HAHAHA I laugh at your ignorance. Anyway, you have to get it to approximately 1.5cm thick evenly throughout. Put some muscle into it. You'll have to add flour as it spreads out. The key is not to stretch the dough, because it will just elasticize back into shape again. You want to spread the dough, which is difficult and requires lots of downward pressing of the rolling pin as you roll. Or pasta roller, which is so much easier. After some sweat and tears, you should arrive at this stage.



You can get 4 approximately 12"x2" noodles out of this, with scraps. I like to cut the sides using my little zigzaggy pastry cutter tool. I don't know how to make them curly like the ones in the box, but that is a reasonable enough approximation. You don't even have to do that. A knife works just fine. Just set the noodles aside as you cut. Ball up the scraps and roll it out again, trying to make it a foot long and a few inches wide.



You can get two more noodles out of this. Whatever scraps you have can be cooked as weird pasta shapes, discarded, or put into the next half of the dough to be rolled. I may or may not have eaten mine.

Put on a large pot of water to boil. Repeat the rolling and cutting process with the second half of dough, so you have 12 noodles.



Don't you feel amazing??

If your water is boiling, add a tbsp or so of salt and your noodles, carefully, one-by-one. Cook for 3-4 minutes and remove to a plate, layering with a little olive oil so they don't stick together.

6. When your sauce has reduced and no longer looks watery, mix in all your eggplant pieces and take it off the heat.



Also, mix in a bowl your cottage cheese, sour cream, egg, and spinach. This is the constituent of your white layers.



7. Assembly time is always fun. You can make it look pretty. This generally goes in a 9x13-inch glass baking dish, but I don't have one right now, so I had to squeeze it into a 8x11-inch glass baking dish. I had to cut my noodles so they fit (if your noodles don't fit the long way, do trim them, as they will otherwise hamper the ease of assembly and final deliciousness of the lasagna by running up the sides).

Anyway, put just a little bit of your sauce in the bottom of your baking dish, along with a sploosh of water and a splish of olive oil, and mix it around to coat the bottom as evenly as possible. Then you can put your first four noodles in, overlapping each other slightly if necessary.



In your pan, divide your sauce into three heaps (it should be reduced enough that it doesn't run back together when you smoosh it apart). Put one heap over the noodles and spread it evenly. Top with a layer of fresh basil leaves.



Put half of your white sauce mixture over the basil leaves in small dollops (trust me on this, you want it evenly dolloped or you will just be mushing around a mixture of red and white sauce and it will no longer be pretty, or quite as tasty). Spread it very carefully so it covers the entire thing.



Repeat, with another layer of noodles, red sauce (you can decide whether or not you want another basil layer, I usually just have one), remaining white sauce, remaining noodles. Before you put the last bit of sauce on top, add a bit of water (1/4 cup, maybe?) and a little olive oil, to thin it out a smidge. Mix it all up in the pan, then put it on top and spread to cover the noodles the best you can. Any noodle that sticks out is going to get impossibly chewy when it cooks. Grate your cheese on top.



8. Cover the dish very loosely with foil and bake 20 minutes (still at 375). Remove the foil, and bake it another 20 minutes. When it comes out, it should be bubbly, a little melty, aromatic, and cooked-looking. And the noodles will have warped and wiggled and will look really neat.



Now you're done, and you can slice and eat it. I usually have one portion and then cut the rest into portions and wrap them in waxed paper and then foil and freeze them. Then I can have them at my leisure.

So, that's how I make lasagna. You can use different vegetables. You can take shortcuts. You can ignore it and make something else entirely. Lasagna doesn't mind. It will still be here. It will be here after you're dead and gone. It doesn't need you. Lasagna is one of those people that is perfectly content with herself, regardless of what everyone else is thinking or doing. If you are nice, she will be nice. If you make time for her, she will make time for you. Or at least a nice dinner.

Would I change anything? Yes... I only used 4oz of sour cream, but I should have used all 8 (like I said in the recipe). I also should have used Organic Valley cottage cheese instead of Nancy's. I dearly love Nancy's cottage cheese, but its cultured, lightly soured taste is not right for a dish with so many tomatoes. Plus, that's what the sour cream is for. I would have used more basil. A bigger dish. A little more seasoning. I probably should have sang and danced as I cooked. Oh well. I am building character.